SCIENCE, POETRY, FREE PLAY

Author

DAVIS, WILLIAM LAMAR, III

Date

1982

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Abstract

The felt antithesis between science and poetry has a long history. Almost every major theorist of literature, from Sidney through Arnold to Cleanth Brooks, has defined literature in contradistinction to science. This rejection of "scientism" and the simultaneous veneration of the symbolic imagination available in literature reached its zenith in the New Criticism, but it has diminished only slightly in those more contemporary "post-structuralist" theories which view themselves in opposition to New Critical arguments. In fact, the rejection of the scientific model has become the cornerstone in most definitions of literature.
There are a good many ironies in this situation. The opposition of referential and non-referential language has resulted in a certain impotence in those theorists who wish to argue against the heightened anti-humanism of post-structuralist theory. Another irony is that while rejecting the calculative enterprise of science, the formalist impulse allowed the hated objectivism of classical science to sneak in the back door. The final and most important irony is that at the very time when the New Critical theorists were reinvigorating the romanticist rejection of science, science itself was undergoing a radical change in theoretic orientation. Modern science, in fact, has encouraged a movement away from objectification, pure referential meaning, and empirically verifiable truth.
The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate these ironies by exploring some of the ramifications which physics and mathematics, the most "exact" of the sciences, may have for literary theory. The primary goal is to correct the misunderstanding which literary theorists have had about the implications of modern science; a secondary goal is to suggest that some of those implications may prove useful to an understanding of symbolic systems and the poet-text-reader relationship. The dissertation provides a survey of critical theories, with greater emphasis given to more recent arguments. These are compared with the implications of relativity theory, quantum mechanics, the mathematical insights of Kurt Godel, and the theses of the so-called "new philosophers" of science.